Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

head.

“Men,” the colonel said, “the enemy isn’t doing this.” “Doing what?” “Adding and subtracting, Sergeant.” “What’s the enemy doing, Colonel?” “They’re cutting up our dud ordnance and blowing off our testicles

with it. They’re living in holes in the ground. They’re not having pudding. They’re eating their children in the name of victory. That’s what they eat for lunch. So let’s get with it. We’ve got one of them on our side now. He could whip half our infantry by himself. He’s come in by every gate—you know the VC’s ‘three gates’? Blood, imprisonment, and time in the North, he’s done all three. Hao can tell you—this guy’s been fighting since the French. He was a prisoner on Con Dau. He went north and was reindoctrinated after the Partition. He came back down on Uncle Ho’s trail and he’s been doing his worst ever since. Couple years ago in Cao Phuc he tried to assassinate me.”

“You’re kidding.” “About a year after Kennedy died, so late ‘64, I’d say. Two and a half years ago. He admitted it to Hao.” He turned to Hao, who’d remained invisible despite his presence at the table, and Hao confirmed it. “He said to me, yes.” “Tossed a grenade into the temple when I was visiting. He’s the real McCoy. Lousy Chinese grenade.” Skip felt his mouth hanging open as he regarded his uncle—drunk, obsolete—absolutely unkillable. “Question is, with that kind of commitment, what’s making him

turn? What does he say, Mr. Hao?” “I don’t know,” Hao said. “That’s the part I don’t like. Don’t like it at all.” “I don’t know,” Hao said. “Listen, listen,” Skip said, suddenly buoyant, “we’ve got to create the

bogus thing, the fiction. Maybe I can help with that.”

“That’s what you came seven thousand miles for. Suppose this. Suppose in the embassy bombing last year some papers got loose in the wind. A transcript, say—minutes of a meeting of a few old pirates who think they’ve got a nuclear weapon they can divert. These horrible folks want to smuggle it into Hanoi and put a stop to the nonsense. What they see as nonsense. Which actually is nonsense.”

“Wait,” Skip said, “not a meeting actually about the, the—whatever you call it—the plot, not the plot itself. The meeting was about trying to stop the plot. These are not the plotters, in other words. They’re the ones trying to investigate the plotters.”

1 get you.

“I don’t,” said Jimmy Storm.

“The papers aren’t the minutes of people actually conspiring,” Skip said, his ears buzzing from the Bushmills, “not of the actual conspiracy, but of folks assessing the, the” —marshalling his powers—”the progress of the conspiracy. So there’s this coded transcript—”

“Not in code. Just some torn fragments that survived the bombing. A few shreds — ” The colonel’s thoughts continued without speech.

Skip regretted getting back to this subject now. The colonel had been right to postpone drinks until they’d discussed it. Now they were discussing it again, and he, for one, didn’t know what he was saying. But the colonel lifted another sip of whiskey to his lips, and it was over. “Give me giants!” he said. “I mean, for the love of—Johnny Brewster? He’s spent the whole war in Washington batting a handball around and scheming how to break up the operation at Cao Phuc. And now it’s broken up— September first, all over, no more. Fucker was OSS. He fought a war: he knows, or once upon a time he musta known—John Brewster must jolt upright in bed some nights and think, Wait a minute, wait a minute, wasn’t this about something else? But before he can remember it’s about the survival of freedom, and human salvation, and the light of the world — the pettiness and bullshit of his dreams drag his head back down to the pillow, and he’s snoring away again. And next morning it’s just about Langley. The war is in Langley, and it’s between guys like him and guys like me, and it’s all about the Agency. I knocked that sonofabitch on his ass. Goddamn these fuckers. What do guys like that think the United States of America is trying to do in Vietnam? Now, wait—and these fuckers in Langley, these fuckers at the Pentagon. These fuckers! They don’t know. They just don’t know.”

He bowed his head.

“Colonel,” Jimmy Storm said.

The colonel raised his head.

“Colonel.”

“Yes.”

“You fuck me up,” Storm said. “Is that a compliment?” “Fuck yes.” “Get me out to the car,” the colonel said. Hao stood up. He took no initiative beyond that. “Hey, guys, hey—why don’t you stay the night?” “No, Skip, no. Best be going back.” “Take me with you. Let me hang around Saigon. Just for the week

end.” “We can’t have you in the city, Skip.” “Come on. I was there for Tet.” “I took pity. No more of that. You’re a soldier.” “Hang around. Please. We can play some poker.”

I m a pogue. Storm said, “He thinks he’s the lost beautiful child.” “Wow,” Skip said, “it’s the American Century.” Storm said, “Rocknroll is here to stay.” Good and drunk, Skip Sands of the CIA stood and aimed himself at

the stairwell. He felt steady enough to climb the stairs and find his room but too dizzy to lie down in it, and so sat in a chair with his feet resting on the wave-flung, heaving bed.

He woke from an hour’s nap and went to the veranda to drink hot, strong coffee less reviving than his thrilling vertigo before the vista of his mistakes, all this wrongness he’d wandered into on the tails of his uncle, the aboriginal Man of Action. Neanderthal, had been Rick Voss’s term. Mr. Tho came out with a burning mosquito coil in a dish and set it on the arm of the opposite chair, and there you are, simplicity itself, the ember of the foul-smelling incense, orange bead tunneling along its spiral path toward extinction and nonentity. He felt surrounded, assailed, inhabited by such serpentine imagery—the tunnels, Project Labyrinth, the curling catacombs of the human ear … But over all loomed the central and quite different image: the Tree of Smoke. Yes, his uncle meant to unfold himself like a dark wraith and take on the whole Intelligence Service, the very way of it, subvert its unturnable tides. Or assault it on the handball court.

For its nourishment, he’d asked for real milk in his coffee. It tasted pretty much like the chalky substitute. The new dog came between his knees and shoved its snout into his cup and went at it with a vocal, snarfing sound.

Uncle F.X., pillar of fire, tree of smoke, wanted to raise a great tree in his own image, a mushroom cloud —if not a real one over the rubble of Hanoi, then its dreaded possibility in the mind of Uncle Ho, the Enemy King. And who could say the delirious old warrior didn’t grapple after actual truths? Intelligence, data, analysis be damned; to hell with reason, categories, synthesis, common sense. All was ideology and imagery and conjuring. Fires to light the minds and heat the acts of men. And cow their consciences. Fireworks, all of it—not just the stuff of history, but the stuff of reality itself, the thoughts of God—speechless and obvious: incandescent patterns, infinitely widening.

At any point before now, he realized, he might simply have told his uncle he wanted to go home. But he couldn’t slip out from under this far along, this deep in, and collapse the sky on his uncle’s anvil head. He wouldn’t see that head bowed low.

He called Tho to the veranda. “What’s the story on this dog?” Tho said, “Le médicin.” “It’s a doctor’s dog?” Tho nodded, gambling on agreement, and retreated. Soon Mrs. Diu came out. “Mr. Tho says the dog has the spirit of Dr.

Bouquet. When the doctor die, after one year the dog is coming.” “Dr. Bouquet was reborn as this dog?” “Yes. Dr. Bouquet.” “Mrs. Diu.” “Yes, Mr. Skip.” “Why won’t Tho speak English to me?” “He doesn’t speak.” “He doesn’t speak English? Or he doesn’t speak at all.” “Yes, sometimes,” she said. “I don’t know.” “Good,” he said. “I hope that clears things up for you.”